Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Watched! (1974)

Every cinefile has endured
the dispiriting experience of realizing that an obscure but promising-sounding
film actually deserves its outsider status. Case in point: Watched!, a paranoid drug film starring Stacy Keach. Seeing as how
Keach was not only one of the most vibrant actors of the ’70s but also, sadly,
a real-life drug addict before he ended his relationship with cocaine, the
synchronicity between actor and subject matter would seem ideal. Yet writer/director
John Parsons squandered the opportunity, because Watched! is amateurish, boring, and opaque. Keach stars as Mike
Mandell, a California assistant district attorney celebrated for putting drug
dealers in jail—at least until he becomes a drug addict himself. The movie
toggles between scenes of straight Mike, a hardass in a suit who shows
criminals no mercy, and user Mike, an alternately wild- and vacant-eyed waste
case who spends his time trying to score with women whenever he’s not trying to
score dope. Interspersed between these elements, naturally, are weird dream
sequences. Although the lead character was apparently based on a real attorney
who fell into an abyss of drug use, Parsons can’t figure out how to put across
the story. The opening titles situate onscreen events “sometime in 1980,” which
was six years in the future at the time Watched!
was made. Huh? Furthermore, Parsons dives right into cutting between different phases
of Mike’s life, without giving audiences the benefit of anything to orient
them. Worst of all, Parsons employs a cheesy cinema-verité technique of
displaying “surveillance footage” recorded by authorities. This translates to
flat scenes of Keach delivering aimless monologues in tight closeups. One of
Keach’s great gifts is intense focus, so asking him to loiter in static frames
while spewing reams of drab dialogue wastes his talent. Harris Yulin costars as
a cop who first works with Mike and later works against Mike, though his scenes
are as lifeless as everything else in Watched!
In fact, “watched” is the last thing this ponderous movie should be.